Kagame trolls burn their bridges | Africa | Africa | Mail & Guardian
Government staff in Rwanda appear to be using fake accounts to harass
journalists on Twitter.

Rwanda has been accused of "unacceptable acts of harassment and
intimidation" against the media after a hostile pro-government Twitter
account using a fake name was traced to the president's office.
Paul Kagame's government last week deported Steve Terrill, a freelance
journalist from the United States who exposed the scandal, in its
latest attempt to crush freedom of expression at home and abroad,
according to the pressure group Reporters without Borders.
The strange case began with Sonia Rolley, a Radio France
Internationale journalist reporting on the deaths of Rwandan
dissidents, who was bullied for months on Twitter by an account with
the handle @RichardGoldston – apparently a reference to South African
judge Richard Goldstone, the first United Nations prosecutor for
Rwanda, though it had no connection to him.
During one bitter exchange Terrill intervened to demand that
@RichardGoldston stop the "misogynistic harassment" of Rolley. A
response then came not from
@RichardGoldston but from
Kagame's official Twitter account, which has 292 000 followers.
Observers seized on the apparent slip of the keyboard as evidence that
the person responsible for the aggressive tweets was close to Kagame
and acted with his blessing. As the controversy grew, the presidency
was forced to admit in a tweet: "@RichardGoldston was an unauthorised
account run by an employee in the presidency. It has been deleted and
the staff member reprimanded."
Inside the president's office
According to Reporters without Borders, Terrill had emailed the
president's office a few weeks earlier to say he had established that
the offensive @RichardGoldston tweets were coming from inside the
president's office, but he got no reply.
Then last weekend, as Terrill arrived in Kigali to report for Al
Jazeera and the Christian Science Monitor on the 20th anniversary of
the Rwandan genocide, he was refused entry at the airport. He was
detained for several hours and was then put on a flight to Ethiopia.
The government gave no reason for barring Terrill but tweeted an
article about an old judicial case in which he was exonerated.
Reporters without Borders said that, since the controversy erupted,
many journalists had been blocked by Kagame's official Twitter
account. It condemned the government's "lack of transparency and its
unacceptable acts of harassment and intimidation of journalists with
the aim of suppressing freedom of information and independent
reporting".
The group – which ranks Rwanda 162nd out of 180 countries in its press
freedom index – said several Ugandan journalists who covered
Rwanda-related stories had recently received threats from the Rwandan
regime, in some cases through its security and intelligence services.
Clea Kahn-Sriber, head of the Africa desk at Reporters without
Borders, said: "The Rwandan government often responds to charges of
blocking information by portraying itself as the target of malicious
international groups that secretly wage what it calls a Blame Rwanda
campaign.
Sensitive topics
"President Kagame needs to understand that people can use legitimate
arguments to criticise his government without questioning the very
foundations of the Rwandan state. How will his country be able to
rebuild its social fabric when raising even slightly sensitive
subjects are forbidden?"
@RichardGoldston, which trolled critics of Kagame including Human
Rights Watch, is far from the only Twitter account to have attacked
journalists in what many suspect is a concerted campaign.
In an article on the Daily Maverick website, journalist Simon Allison
wrote: "With a few unfortunate clicks,
@RichardGoldston lifted the facade on this operation – and gave us an
unprecedented insight into the heart of the presidency itself.
"The opinions and emotions expressed there certainly aren't diplomatic
but the world according to Kagame's troll reveals more about Rwanda
than a dozen carefully worded press releases ever could." –
© Guardian News & Media 2014
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SIBOMANA Jean Bosco
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